Marjorie R. Sims earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nevada and a master’s degree in Governmental Policy from California State University. In the 1980s she began her career in public policy as a Congressional Black Caucus staffer. Sims subsequently served as a senior legislative assistant for the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues; executive director of the California Women’s Law Center (1987-2008); a co-founder of Women’s Policy, Inc. (1995); a policy analyst at the International Center for Research on Women (1999-2008); a board member of the Independent Directors Council (2001); chief operating officer of the Washington Area Women’s Foundation (2004-08); a board member of the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies (2005); a member of the Los Angeles City Task Force for the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (2005); a board member of Women’s Policy, Inc. (2005-08); a board member of the Project on Government Oversight (2005-08); an advisory board member of the California Black Women’s Health Project (2006-18); a program officer with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (2009-11); and a board member of the now-defunct Change Inc. (2014).

More recently, Sims has been a board member of Springboard Housing — whose primary mission is to increase the availability of affordable housing for low-income people — since 2017. She also serves currently as managing director of the Aspen Institute‘s ASCEND program, whose stated mission is to “move children and the adults in their lives to educational success, economic security, and health and well-being.”

In addition to the aforementioned affiliations, Sims also has been a board member of Women’s Prerogative, an organization whose declared aim is to use the Internet “to share information with women about things that matter to them, provide women with a place to talk about those issues, and offer women a way to do something about them, easily and conveniently from their desktop.”

Further Reading: “Marjorie Sims” (ZoomInfo.com, Women’s Rights in Theory & Practice, AspenIdeas.org, Ascend.AspenIstitute.org).